


Wherein the Wife Watches the In-Laws Play Baseball

by kayliemalinza



Series: Rambleverse [6]
Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: F/M, Josa POV (Rambleverse), Kayliemalinza's Rambleverse, Pre-Academy Years (Rambleverse Timeline)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-05
Updated: 2011-02-05
Packaged: 2017-11-02 07:26:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/366468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kayliemalinza/pseuds/kayliemalinza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gogol prompted me for "anything about the Ex and Joanna and springtime." So I wrote her some happy-funtime-fluff fic, because The Ex is such a happy-funtime-fluff character. :) NB: I am a cruel and filthy liar.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wherein the Wife Watches the In-Laws Play Baseball

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gogollescent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/gifts).



Josa sits in the chair farthest out, a flimsy plastic thing that doesn't match the others. It sinks too much in soft ground. The McCoy yard ain't straight-up swamp but it's close enough that the air gets peppery with clouds of gnats. It rained this morning, too. Josa has to keep her feet hard on the ground to keep from falling over in this damn chair but at least it isn't rusty.

Leonard's mother is sitting in a metal-frame lawn chair and her ice cream ass is bowing out the weave of plastic strips they call a seat. The rust is on the front left leg. There's a jagged edge there, too. The metal buckled from being old and it rusted from being sweated on by the backs of fat knees. Josa's keeping her child away from that chair. It could slice her baby doll fingers right open. Leonard could fix it, but there'd be a fuss.

The baby shrieks from the other end of the yard. Josa looks but it's just Davy, the middle brother, tossing her child in the air. Josa doesn't like that but Joanna does. He can keep carrying on but if he drops her once, that's it. No more playing.

Leonard comes up from behind to press a beer into her hand and Josa tells him what she thinks.

"The ground's pretty clean over there," he says to reassure. He's talking about junk, not dirt. They don't let Joanna play near the road. Maybe people in this town wouldn't get called trash if they didn't leave it everywhere.

Libby's nosy. She comes over, switching her hips like she's at work and wanting tips. "God, you two are so overprotective!" she says, and shakes her head so hard it makes her earrings jangle. Josa and Leonard look at her. Honeychile, you just don't know.

Sometimes Josa sees Leonard's grandfather out the corner of her eye and thinks her father has followed her from Alabama but no, that sumbitch ain't seen her since she shipped out as an emancipated ensign at seventeen. He probably thinks she's still out there, and that's fine. She's good in space. She can fall as fast as anyone and never make a sound.

Mr. Ephram ain't nothing like her father. He's skinny in the arms and talks like a car door creaking open. His fingers, when Joanna hugs his knees, pick soft as fly-legs at her hair. He's alright; just a brother who found himself a white woman and raised her dead husband's baby with his own.

"Anyway," says Libby. "We're about to play some baseball. You in?"

Josa shakes her head. She wrenched her ankle doing reserve training last weekend. Pike said they wouldn't have docked her pay if she'd stopped for the ankle but that's stupid. She ran on it for two miles because that's how you keep living.

There's nothing riding on this ballgame, though. Davy is the only one with technique worth anything and home plate is a dinner plate. Leonard's mama says a baseball broke it so that's fitting.

"You go," Josa says to Leonard.

"You gonna watch?" he says.

"I'll watch," she says. She always watches Leonard. She keeps looking to see if he's different when she's not around, but he isn't. He's a good man all the time. What's that feel like.

He's a fit man, too, muscled up how Josa likes it. No chore watching him. But he rounds the bases too slow, no peripheral awareness, no sneak-easy weave when Davy steps in to tag him out. He'd die on the field. Even quick people do. Pike wasn't supposed to be on-planet last week but he was, with his arm in a sling.

Typical away mission, he said. Local fauna, lots of claws. It's still attached, though, so I can't complain.

Josa likes that, how he doesn't think to step lightly around her and how he doesn't have to.

He said something else that day but Josa won't go back up. Not while Joanna's still as small and helpless as she is. Not while Leonard's still got student loans and not much salary to pay them.

It'll take six years to build my ship, Pike said. Plenty of time for you to make Commander. First mission is long-term deep space; good pay.

Joanna will be a child when I leave and a young woman when I come back. If I do.

You don't have to give me an answer now, Pike said.

He'll keep trying, waiting for her goodness to run out. He knows what he wants and he's a sneaky sumbitch.

Leonard's on the field again. Fast innings with few players.

Libby steps up and thinks it's cute to hit the ball into the swamp.

"Run home, Daddy, run home!" the baby shrieks. She flails around on her grandma's lap but Leonard's mother has thick arms and she's holding tight enough. The baby's legs are plenty far from goddamn rust.

Leonard lopes across the plate while Davy's rooting around on the waterline. Unless he gets his waders out, that ball's a loss.

"I wanna hit like that!" the baby's yelling. She lets Leonard lift her down from his mama's lap but then she's off to Libby. Her hands can't reach around the handle yet but that won't stop her. Good girl. A baseball bat's a useful thing to be familiar with.

"Aw, hell, you got that look," says Leonard.

"What look," says Josa. "That ground is wet."

Leonard plops down anyway and lays his head on her lap. "Can we at least let our child get through the princess phase before you start teaching her how to box?" he says.

"I wasn't going to say anything about that." No point to it. Leonard hit the roof when she first brought it up and then got mulish.

Leonard tugs her hand down and kisses the palm of it like he don't know what that does to her. "She ain't grown yet, darlin'. We got plenty of time."

"I never said we didn't," Josa says.

She's not leaving yet.


End file.
